did you know the price is the only industry specifically mentioned in the constitution. that's because a free and open press is critical to our democracy. to make you know i'm sorry and on this show we reveal the picture of what's actually going on when we go beyond identifying a problem you trust rational debate a real discussion critical issues facing america is ready to join the movement then welcome to. the launch of our in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture. alec is in the public eye

like never before but if you think they're ready to come clean about everything they're up to then think again right now that organization is hard at work trying to make sure that you are kept in the dark about their newest plans to gut the middle class more those plans in just a moment also wall street bankers have a pretty high opinion of themselves and back sixty percent of bank executives think their job isn't ethical what are they why are just completely nuts to talk about that and more in tonight's lone liberal rumble and the motor city is running on empty the media likes to talk about greedy unions and expensive pensions but what's the real reason for the decline of what once was and still is a great american city. i'll tell you in tonight's dealy take. you need to know this the american legislative exchange council or alec is back and

with a vengeance this week the right wing lobbying group is meeting in washington d.c. our nation's capital for its annual states and. policy summit over the next three days alex a billionaire donors and hired politicians will lay out their twenty fourteen strategy for god in the middle class most of the planning will go on behind closed doors secrecy you see is alex top priority right now because over the past year they've been placed in the public eye like never before in the nonstop coverage of the george zimmerman trial shed light on alex key role in getting the stand your ground shoot first laws passed by state legislatures across the country on behalf of their member of the national rifle association and as a result many about the usual donors are staying away they're worried about how their relationship with that organization is going to affect the appearance of their business but alec is far from defeated earlier today i sat down with his constant congressman mark polk and to talk about alex plan for the coming year and

what they're doing to keep their plan secret in the face of unprecedented scrutiny started out by talking about whether or not alec actually qualifies for their current nonprofit status. there in d.c. this week with a bunch of conservative legislators doing what they do best which is matching up conservative legislators and special interest corporations having the corporations write legislation for them to introduce in the states approving that legislation is an organization helping them pass that legislation in the states and the bottom line is it's much like a corporate dating service you know doing this matching in the end they're the biggest lobbying firm really in the country yet they're still a five a one c three nonprofit not really complying with the regulations that they should as a lobbying entity which is what they are yeah back in seventy eight my wife and i started a community for abused kids up in new hampshire it's still there and still running

and it's a five one c three and i always thought it was illegal for us to do any. idea to. percent funny but when you look at what alec it is that's all they're set up to be as a legislator when i joined and went to their conferences and i saw it firsthand you know the corporations literally write the legislation for you to introduce in your states as a state legislator they tell you how to get it passed they promote it everything they do is exactly what a lobbying firm does when they deal with you whether it's in the legislature of congress and yet they're somehow instead a nonprofit in really skirting the law as you ask them to explain to you how is that they're legitimately doing what they're doing what was the response similar to a cricket sound like in a field i saw there was no respond ok and i know that common cause it also has filed a complaint with us and from some of the documents that were leaked to this just this week in a guardian article that came out the lawyer for alec even admitted that i.r.s. might very likely look at them as a lobbying organization so now they're creating

a new five a one c four and it's entity to try to get around the laws so they basically admitting that what they've been doing all along has been lobbying and now they're trying to get compliant all of the sudden so they're admitting essentially by their actions that what they've been doing was illegal actually or at least a violation of tax law and as a five one see for this is called the jefferson project i have this right the average others already and project are going to rebranded them selves as well as well at least the separate entity but you know again what they've been doing all along is what now they're going to try to do at least maybe legally for a change is the lobby on behalf of special interest legislation for corporations and have it introduced in state legislatures and sometimes even having tried to have an impact in congress and again all this legislation is on behalf of special interests not the public good and the fact that at their annual conference thousands of people show up legislators from across the country and introduce these state by state by state it's a very unfortunately a very effective organization in getting their agenda done and there's no

progressive left wing even big democratic equivalent oh no you know one time there's a good. center for policy alternatives there's a group of impressive states that work that does some of it but nothing is like alec alec is the eight hundred pound gorilla really they're probably a twelve hundred pound gorilla by what they get done and the counterbalance really should be that you know they're registered as a for profit entity because that's what they're doing is lobbying and to take that under a five a one c three status and you know past stand your ground laws into a consumer law into a worker laws all the sort of things they do it's pretty insidious as an organization well it's pretty bizarre too because if i want to see three or in a five one c four we're supporting them with our tax dollars exactly exactly you were supporting them to give us bad legislation that takes money out of the public coffers and release the liver's it to special interests not in the public good so let's talk about what their agenda is for next year they it has been leaked and by

the guardian and i guess a few other sources what they're up to like to just go through a couple of things you know number one there have been a number of attempts around the country to label g.m.o. as alec wants to go even beyond that and say basically you have no right to know what's in your food and my is that an exaggeration no that's a sense you are trying to do and you know some people like al franken and myself are actually working on a bill right now to try to deal specifically labeling of dairy which is really important in the upper midwest so you know the country of origin they want to go just the opposite direction that many of us are trying to do so that people know they have food safety and security incredible and i saw an article and it was over a economy in crisis or that less than one percent of imported fish is actually inspected i mean we just don't have the resources and yet something like sixty percent of the fish now served in the u.s. i mean an enormous amounts of food are coming to this country and alec is saying no you don't even have the right to know what country it came from if you want some of it if you've heard some of the stories about how it's treated in these countries before it comes here you'd probably never eat that product again and it's literally

that bad to some of them but that's where alec is working ok so that number one number two undermining worker rights. they want to they want to take right to work for us as it's been applied in the private business arena and put it on steroids and the government right now to have this right exactly we saw this firsthand in my home state of wisconsin where they had the collective bargaining changes all of those sort of laws came through alec through states like wisconsin in michigan in other places so this is the same sort of agenda that we've seen in the past but now they're getting more and more specific in how they do that and it's all in a worker anti-consumer sort of was just like you described they want to it seems take us back to the era before ralph nader for nader's one hundred sixty five unsafe at any speed the movements that came out of that were consumers actually started suing corporations for making decisions that led to the death of individuals make it much much harder for individuals to hold corporations are

comparable and my last session in the legislature before i was elected to congress we saw a number of these when the republicans took over the legislature all sorts of things that roll back consumer protections that allowed for taking away your bill your legal rights when you've been harmed by a product or good or a service and this is part of the agenda state by state extraordinary undermining public education and go and promoting more of these for profit schools school choice they call it really it's taxpayer funded vouchers your tax dollars leaving the public system going to private schools with sometimes very little or minimal standards and very little on outcomes so really taking away from public education and putting into private entities another piece of alex upcoming years agenda seems to be stripping environmental regulations you know our protections from polluters yeah you know when i went out ever forget they had a book they gave us fifty reasons why increased levels of c o two are good for you they gave us a very good seriously seriously by a scientist and this is just

a given part of the agenda it's taking away a regulation that protects the public for environment. standards and continues to make it easier to pollute and harder to have consumer protections for people especially who've been harmed by environmental problems it's extraordinarily they want to reduce patient rights and patient protections how to how to do this again goes back to more anti-consumer provisions where you're losing your ability to have protections when you go in in the marketplace. it's all very much a free market kind of a free market at steroids sort of agenda that you don't bluff the buyer beware just kind of go in and let the profits are going to dictate decisions not the public good where government's always been kind of that arbitrator making sure that the public is protected at the same time that the free market can make money instead they just want to have the free market kind of controlling their operation which as you and i know doesn't necessarily provide protections for the public you know and historically has been the there's a reason why we got where we are and undermining the social safety net legislation

. they've fought many of the efforts of things that we've had in place for many years here in congress right now i'm seeing this kind of fight on food stamps but we see similar fights on medicaid other provisions in the states where again they're trying to stop programs that have really been in the public interest and often been there for a long time and reverse that so you can put money back into corporate profits and lower taxes for the wealthiest rather than providing protections for the people who are the neediest in our communities when we first started this conversation you referred to the folks who show up at the zealots meeting as the legislators state legislators as conservative republicans my dad was a conservative republican he's not around any longer but he would be horrified by this i think barry goldwater would be horrified by this this is a corporatist agenda and not a conservative this doesn't comport with russell kirk or even you know cirebon burke i mean it is now time for us to change our language and start calling this

what it is if you're i mean it's i always say it's corporate special interests that dominate this organization they were. legislation but you're right it's that made dating service between those corporate special interests and these generally conservative legislators although not under the definition that we've always known a conservative to mean but that seems to be were they able to marry them and then have them introduce this legislation often not again at their constituents best interest but just for these special interest best interests then we probably should have a different dialogue about how we talk about congress mark ok thanks so much for being absolutely think you to appreciate it it's always a pleasure. health care dodd gob is finally working like it's supposed to so why doesn't anybody talking about the real reason the website was so good that and more and. more right after the break.

sublunary say hello i'm very sorry to say going to let you get along here is a plot that you never had sex with others make their lives let's play.

lists le mieux let's. listen to. the.

wendy are you ready to rumble joining me for tonight's lone liberal chris allman a conservative commentator and activist and horoscope or conservative commentator and senior fellow with the national center for public policy research and thank you both for joining me great to be here it's great to have you with us the obamacare website is up and finally running well consumer reports actually rated the well today after nearly a month of fixes and updates the website relaunched over the weekend monday nearly three quarters of a million people seven hundred fifty thousand people visited the site double the traffic for a monday since the website was first rolled out of course the media's all over the relaunch but what they're not covering is why the web site had so many issues in the first place thirty six states led by republicans opposed to obamacare chose not to create their own exchanges thus throwing the workload to the federal government and the federal obamacare website which originally was supposed to just be a portal states they didn't create their own exchanges had very few problems with

their sign up websites including very republican kentucky so the web site debacle was thanks to republicans trying to sabotage obamacare and the obama administration so why isn't the press and fred matter why isn't the democratic party why isn't the president holding the republicans accountable for their sabotage i am i'm a little shocked here tom because this is not a news flash we have known for i don't know how long ago was it that the secretary of h.h.s. said states i have to know if you're going to be in or not and all these states today there is a trigger day and all they say is said no we're not going in so they. we knew well in advance that the that they were going to be responsible that was what was in the law that obama and his friends wrote and they passed they knew that and now suddenly a month and a half later you're blaming republicans we told you guys a long time ago we're having this lays out some good we don't want to get it we don't have any money and in fact this is or anything else no we're not going to do that idea in you and that that i mean all that fine you're mysie it you're missing

the medal point you're going to the micro point you're missing the medal point the night that obama was inaugurated you had republicans sitting in the caucus room restaurant conspiring about how to destroy the presidency jim de mint who was in that meeting later said they were going to break him you had you had we have had consisted you know mitch mcconnell said that his number one job was to make sure that this that the president would fail two days after that meeting in the caucus room restaurant was rush limbaugh went on the radio and said i want to make him a failed president i want to make policies his policy we were talking about is a policy i agreed with yes i defy you first of all blackstone's law dictionary and well you're a lawyer and ok you know blacks oswald if there's any of us here tonight actually you're a letter to chris i realize that. ok and define sedition as an insurrection or movement tending toward treason but lacking and over act attempts made by meetings or speeches or by publications to disturb the tranquility of the state congratulations are there mr obama's chief crime aren't and that is are you already

simply akins committing no it isn't there i mean as a democratic analog can you identify for me any time in our lifetimes and between the three of us that spans a distance any time when democrats have set out to destroy the presidency of a republican i know democrats would do well to read with the what did they do to destroy his presence ok first of all let's talk about the first president bush the senate majority leader a democrat from new england made it his. personal career effort to see to it that mr bush would not be reelected stymieing him at every turn reversing course on tax policy and trade policy labor policy soley to make him wounded heading into the upcoming election and he was quite successful george herbert walker bush was the election because he was up against bill clinton probably wasn't really a longer election it was that someone decided. to our entire

parody what they fired to destroy him was a baby it is they use the power of the senate to be able to manipulate we didn't have a mess in b.c. at the time had we had it they would have used it we didn't have all of the other liberal organs that we had them but they used them but then when president bush the second came into office we saw this and it was way more venomous then i don't. know it's you're absolutely wrong i see exact opposite the democrats were opposed to medicare part. at absolute zero and. that was not flawless see that was true. to the library law i don't know about bush lied about whether there were weapons of mass casualty that's bush that was his secretary of state only other it was actually mr obama who said if you like your policy you can keep it but it's mr obama who when was it going back to your

ambition and then what is there who promised to transfer form this nation and he has done some of the most destructive things to this country imaginable but debt situation or an international religion says wait an hour and is the result of two bush wars that were not on the books that won the one on the books when obama became president said ok i will put them on the books that the result of a recession i was worried about by twenty years of reaganomics deafened the result and the deficit numbers quadrupled under mr obama jefferson has dropped by a third if ever i was hurt. george was one who pulled it was two hundred a deficit with flora what it was when bush rocks zero it went from zero zero under all the way up to one hundred zero under bill clinton yes i can dream that went from zero followed way up to four hundred what did it go to under the bush and obama administration all the way to one point three trillion and by and they're sitting in a row that was that was there

a limit on what is the hill your number five is going to be you still haven't addressed why billion dollars of the republicans not only are doing it but bragging about doing it that they are trying to destroy this president so i don't recall democrats and probably way that's because you have selective memory is like you know what i haven't heard from chris here so you know what that. i don't know how often your viewers or you actually listen to conservative talk radio or conservative t.v. but we have been very clear that we are opposed to his ideas and not him as an individual but that we oppose things like government takeover of one sixth of our economy we are opposed to a president you know saying i can't get immigration. i can't you know there's going to yeah the stock is going to i you know i can't get the immigration reform that i wanted and i didn't try to do it when i had both houses of congress work and so now i am going to unilaterally say i don't tell my executive branch not to enforce

the laws on the books that is the last and there are no i mean there are a lot of your laundry list hollywood things that a president is doing that we don't like that is nothing about him as a person and you know what if he did a bill clinton and came to the center and said hey let's compromise things would be different but he has no intention of doing that and that is where you know what's amazing to hear what's amazing to me here whether guys can be it whether we get whether you guys are right or wrong and whether i'm right or wrong the thing that's amazing to me is how differently we're viewing it's just you know i just let's move on pope francis' tea party activist jonathan mosley i had him on my radio show today very interesting conversation he published a column the world net daily sunday arguing that jesus christ is weeping in heaven because of pope francis is views and critiques and capitalism and because pope francis dared to call out trickle down economics of reagan's invention the pope has repeatedly spoken out against the greed and tyranny of capitalism and urged his

followers to care more for the most vulnerable of human beings and to work for a more equal and just society policy is always pray for preaching a lot of your neighbor help those who are less fortunate but france is just following this tradition. based on the teachings of catholicism how can someone be a catholic and a republican for a million reasons. athlete yes. i am and i and i'll tell you i have not read what the pope wrote. but i hope to but really what the pope was saying is that if we conservatives or anyone view the free market as a religion the way that the left views government policy as able to create or heaven on earth or perfect this life on earth that's wrong you're making then you're making the free market here your lives asserts. that the the people who are promoting trickle down have major religion and that is wrong and i agree that it's

totally wrong because as a christian i don't think that perfection is attainable on earth i think that like winston churchill said about government saying you know look the free market is not perfect but it's the best system we have out of a lot of really crappy systems so you know what i you know i just think that the pope was saying that it's not a panacea and it's not but what one thing that christ and i think that the tourch says it's individual's responsibility to help their neighbor but to have the government say you know what tom i have to take yours and i say that and give it to somebody else you will recall the young man i think it was you know it wasn't the century and it was just an individual came to jesus with a with a coin and i said should i pay my taxes so that and jesus said yes he said whose pictures on a caesar page is your letters with the right caesars that those had the roman empire at that time actually had welfare programs so yeah this was i say no no no

taxes for the weather to be able to live it well for programs that is mount true but you know that was not the nancy christ said what he said was the question was presented to him as a tool to get the roman government to arrest him all right spot for him directions if he had said anything of them rinder interesting as are the things that are caesar's here and i would. god what is go and what is god his most important message was remember though render under god now now his most important message was it's going to be easier for hamill to get through i have no need to live now read everything about heaven is love look at how many people came to him and said what do i do and he said give everything away to the poor. the lord your god with all your heart soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself now it's the first commit but if you let your government love your neighbor instead of you then then that isn't good either that's correct and that is less of a role so in a manner as we have we will wash responsibility less so you're not just you know

sir hand i mean as jesus did say you want the government to take over this religious function jane this was talking to her and there is a huge hostility of doing what jesus said there is enough to launch hostility that progressives have with the idea that we as individuals have responsibilities to our neighbors in america and because of the government and we've had this conversation a number of times all government with problems out charity the government problems of our us but let's morris about the pace at all there's no reason for the government isn't big enough to crowded out it's not crowding it out go to south sudan i've been there go to go to kenya go to argentina go to it goes a supporter going to the ocean listening range then yes you know it's a good speech many of these made me one capitalist haven where you're talking about the poverty that you see in these places where government is most of them but you know what i have i go to europe norway denmark sweden finland germany france play

all have war lagarde levels than we but they are not places where capitalism re they are doing our due diligence going here is a name that's my point man. made me a place where capitalism reigns where you have this kind of abject poverty like you see somalia so some of it is so obvious below free marcela state sometimes we might . clear fail it's a total free market the government provides a military that's it is totally libertarian ok it's now is what the net net it is going to i asked i asked of the are you still beating your question wife you know as a possible be a christian and an hour and a republican which is kind of a tough question is it possible do you think for to be a christian or a catholic and a democrat of course yeah ok i mean it was always so let's have a bunch of a number of senators on those real quick really quick michael knows that you're already a great book the. the democratic socialist democratic i'll walk because i was going to go back read more of tonight's long that will add to

the spirit. i got a quote for you. it's pretty tough. stay with substory. let's get this guy like you but smear about john stead of working for the people both issues the beach media were pretty much on the right on his vision but. they did read it well. we're at the. site. i think corporations kind of. can do and the bank i think it's all about money and the national effect for a politician quite a lot and basically. there's

just too but. today's side. up. i would rather ask questions to people in positions of power instead of speaking on their behalf and that's why you can find my show larry king now right here on r.t. question for.